


Bone-Strewn Plains

by dimircharmer



Category: Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Western, Alternate Universe: Wild West, American history in all it's unvarnished awfulness, Colonialism, Gen, Genocide, Slavery, Violence, what I mean to say is:
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-15
Updated: 2016-06-15
Packaged: 2018-07-15 07:49:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,459
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7213912
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dimircharmer/pseuds/dimircharmer
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>America is pressing inexorably, terrifyingly west, and cares little for those it crushes along the way.<br/>*<br/>I got a prompt on tumblr to write a TFA wild west AU, and uh, the wild west was pretty colonial and awful, so this is an attempt to stare that straight in the face and grapple with it, not ignore it. Mind the tags.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Bone-Strewn Plains

**Author's Note:**

> Mind the tags. This has been cleaned up slightly since I posted it on tumblr.

Rey’s first memory is this: it is cold and she is walking. Someone, somewhere is crying, and there are men on horseback (she remembers their legs, how huge they were, how they penned them in on all sides) but mostly there are just people in one long chain of misery from here to the horizon. She is clutching her mothers skirt, shivering in a leather dress, and she is terrified. Her mother is stroking her hair, singing the sorts of nonsense things that mothers say to frightened children. When they stop for the night, her mother pulls her hair from her face, carefully, and puts it in one of those buns that she sees white women wearing, doesn’t leave it loose around her shoulders, or in her braids. She is so, so scared, she can't tell if she's shaking from cold or fear. Her mother pulls back, and examines her handiwork with a critical eye. 

“At least,” her mother says finally, “you look like your father. I want you to run to that town and stay there, until one of us can come and get you. You must stay there, you can’t follow us, do you understand?”

Rey is crying, crying, and she nods. She runs, at her mother’s direction, in the middle of the night to the lights in the distance, and never sees her again.

*

Her name is not Rey. It is longer, and more beautiful, but she stuttered the first time she introduced herself, and the man at the saloon had laughed. He was huge, by any standards, not just those of a six year old, and he leered at her.

"Well," he said, "I'm sure I can find something for you to do around here, Rey."

She tries, to other people who pass through town but no one could pronounce it and she was six and alone and terrified and didn’t protest the abbreviation. She is put to work sweeping and cleaning an peeling potatoes and as she grows she watches the railroads start to stretch across the plain, the influx of cows from Texas, watches the share croppers and the civil war veterans make sod houses and tar paper walls and thinks how stupid a way of living that is.

They all call her Rey, and she has stopped correcting them. She can’t remember what her full name is, any more, and hopes her mother will tell her when she comes back. She will come back.

*

When Rey is twelve, there is a winter so cold it froze the herds of cattle where they stood in the fields. The next spring it stank to high heaven, and by the summer, the bones were bleached white in the fields.

Once the rail lines are put in,there are big city folk who ride the railroad, and shoot herds of Buffalo with Gatling guns out the window, to say they have done it, and leave the corpses to rot. Others, on the search for cheap lap-blankets, hunt down the herds and slaughter them, leaving them skinless to rot in the fields. Within a season, the heat and the bugs pick them dry.

Rey, twelve years old, quits her job at the bar and leaves to walk the plains, to pick over the skeletons left behind. The skulls are worth the most, but other bones get turned into dice and buttons and fertiliser, and she can still sell them for beans and flour and for a new blade on her shovel. She picks up each piece with a solemnity that the other bone pickers don't match,and thinks that at least this way hey are going to use and not to waste.

*

The civil war is half a generation over, and slavery never really ended. Technically speaking, Finn isn't a slave, but forced labour working in a chain gang for the railroad doesn’t feel much different. He literally cannot remember another life to this one. There's a TnT accident, trying to blast through a canyon that kills three of his oldest friends, and he barely has time to scrub their blood off his clothes before they put him back in the line. Chained beside him now is a cow thief, who claims to be from actual Mexico.

“It ain’t as far south as you think it is,” he says, stretching his legs out by the fire. “‘sides, it ain’t stealing if it’s on your land and they stole your cows in the first place, now is it?”

He grins, straight white teeth unmarked by chewing tobacco or sugar, and he is surprised every time his chains clank. He claims to know every route from railroad to cow trail between here and California, and that no one could ever catch him if he got free.

"'course," he says, chewing mournfully on an undercooked spoonful of beans, "That don't mean nothin' on account of I ain't got a horse to ride." He sighs, and rolls over to get some sleep, tucking his hat down over his eyes, and the wheels in Finn's head lurch into motion.

Finn is a known quantity.

Finn is trusted.

Finn is put in charge, one night, of tending the horses, and he seizes his shot at freedom with both hands.

*

Rey's home, before the bounty hunters after Finn set it alight, is nothing more than a boxcar which has rolled a dozen times into a ravine by the side of the tracks. It had come to rest there in the middle of the civil war, and by the end of the war, it was too rusted to bother retrieving. There is a stream nearby, and Rey stuffs a straw mattress to set on the floor, and it keeps the sun and the rain off well enough for her purposes. Finn collapses onto the mattress, exhausted and thirsty and heartsick, and wakes up to a rifle in his face.

When Finn babbles, terrified, about his friend who lived in California, Mexico, California, and how he planned to go out and meet him there, she is interested enough to lower the rifle. She offers to show him the way into town, and no more. When they get into town, and discover a group of men hunting for him, she shoves him against the side of the saloon and shoots one of them without him having to say more than two words about it. In the confusion, and the shootout, Rey steals a horse. He clings to her waist, terrified, and twists to shoot behind them at their tail. It's a wild, panicked, two day ride through canyons and jumps and once through an abandoned, derelict mine-shaft that Rey tells him to shoot and collapse behind them, but they escape. 

It's just about their luck that they end up in the camp of the civil war's most notorious railroad highjacker, but to Finn's relief, he seems to have put his bounty hunting days behind him. Finn is still careful to pull his pants down over the lighter patches of skin around his ankles, and keeps to the other side of the fire as Solo makes them coffee.

Rey grips the battered little tin cup in both hands, and earnestly tells him about Finn's plan to get to California, and something goes soft around his eyes, and says as long as they're heading west, there's somewhere they need to stop by, first.

*

 Maz Kanata seems impossibly old. She is, Han tells them in an undertone, nearly ninety. She has lived on three continents, and bears five different brands upon her skin, and she’s been a runaway and a freedman for sixty years. Her hair, wildly curly and white, is pulled back behind a colourful wrap, and she’s been running this saloon since before the civil war. Her hands are arthritic, she has a shotgun in her belt, and she has to stack two pairs of glasses on her nose in order to see them clearly.

She sees Rey, and with her wrinkled hands gently touches her face. Touches the bridge of her nose, and her cheekbones. Rey has always looked sun kissed, although she wraps her face in linen in some half-remembered advice whenever she works in the sun. She is, without ever going in the sun directly, the same shade as the leathered cowhands who never go indoors. Folks look at her cotton dress, and the brown hair on her head and her relative lightness of skin and figure she's just a civil war orphan making a living on the plains. 

Maz traces her face, squints at her, as if she can see the bones through the skin and says “ah, child. You already know, don’t you. Whomever you are waiting for, they are never coming back.”

**Author's Note:**

> that thing about the winter and the gattling guns from the train and the lap blankets are true, by the way. that's where your image of the bone-strewn west comes from.


End file.
